The Mercenary Major (3 page)

“Well,” he said carefully, “we need not take time out from menageries and adventures. I can get by with my uniforms for a while, and I’ll be on my way soon enough.”

“But Jack, you must stay through Christmas,” she cried, and her hands flew up like startled birds, then clenched abruptly as if she were holding something back.

A single coarse Spanish word came to Jack’s mind. He was a fool, he realized, to think he could come even for a few days to the world of the
ton
without the necessary silver in his pocket. He had banked most of the money Lady Letitia had sent him over the years, and he meant to return it to her, not to draw on her for more. One trip to a tailor would end that resolve. “I have no funds,” he confessed.

“Of course you don’t,” she said, as if relieved to hear his objection. “Nor should you be expected to spend your own blunt to please me. If I require you to attend some dinner, it is only right that I provide such monies as will outfit you in style, just as . . . just as the army provided you with a rifle.”

He had to laugh at her reasoning. “But ma’am,” he argued, pushed to admit a still greater obstacle to her plans for him, “even if I allow you to dress me up as a gentleman, I am not sure I know how to
be
one. My manners are likely to cause you some embarrassment.”

“Never think so,” she admonished him. “You shall merely be thought to have a romantic background, and soon all the proper young ladies of London will be sighing over you as they did over Lord Byron before his troubles.”

Jack stiffened. Improper young ladies might sigh over him, but proper young misses would be advised by their mamas to shun him.

“I would not want to mislead any romantic miss, ma’am, for I won’t marry until I make my way in the world, in America, I think.”

This was terrible, Letty thought. He was not going to give her a chance to make a home for him. She had so much more to do than she had dreamed if she wished him to take his rightful place among the Favertons and the
ton
. And she would restore Helen’s son to the world from which Helen had been banished so many years before.

“A noble sentiment, Jack,” she said, “but you may make the acquaintance of any of my friends and speak to all the shocking flirts in London without feeling obliged to offer marriage.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. But how could she be so trusting and so generous?

“It is not for me to doubt you, Lady Letitia,” he said, ignoring the little flicker in her gaze when he used her title. “It is you who should question me. How can you be sure I
am
Jack Amberly? Don’t you wish for some proof?”

“Oh, dear, no,” she protested. “We Favertons have not done well by you at all, Jack. When I think of what difficulties you must have faced—a boy orphaned so far from home—I am grateful you came to me at all.”

“But suppose I am not that boy,” he suggested, standing abruptly. He turned from her and strode to the white scrolled mantel, letting her ponder that thought. Reaching the hearth, he stretched out his hands to its warmth before he faced her again and put into words what he knew would be said against him soon enough. “Suppose I am merely some rogue down on his luck who came by your letters and means to take advantage of your kindness?”

Letty studied Jack’s face. She could have told him that the blue of his eyes was Faverton blue and that his height and bearing and handsome looks were just what his father’s had been when Captain Tom Amberly had come to Faverton Hall in the company of a rich friend and captured Helen Faverton’s daring heart. But the same instinct that had won her the trust of strays of every sort kept her silent for a moment.

“What could you hope to gain with such a fraud?” she asked at last, pleased by the pause that followed her question.

“You must not know how it is in the army, ma’am,” Jack said, “if you cannot guess at the temptations offered by your invitation. The Duke sent us all a silver medal for beating Boney, but it will be months, perhaps years before we’re paid what the army owes us. That silver medal wouldn’t buy me the crumbs from any table in London. And I suspect you’ve a bed prepared for me that’s finer than most I have lain in.”

“I should hope so,” said Letty. She was pleased to observe that she had surprised her guest again.

“Perhaps it is too fine a bed for a thief,” Jack suggested. He wondered how much of his history she really did know.

“Now, Jack,” said his hostess firmly. “Sergeant Hengrave and Corporal Gilling, who acted for me in this matter, made the most thorough investigation before I ever wrote to you directly. And if you were a thief, you were so out of necessity.”

“For a time,” he conceded. “I could have left off sooner. There are many poor but honest boys in Madrid.”

“But no doubt they have families,” Letty answered, meeting that somber gaze. His pride had been hurt by whatever shifts had been necessary to his survival, and now she feared that same pride would keep him from accepting his place among the
ton
. “No, Jack, I will not hear of any unworthiness from you,” she said. “As for your staying till Christmas, you must do as you wish, but you are promised to me for the balloon ascension.”

An incongruous wisp of memory caught in her mind at the sight of him then. She remembered the lonely winter after Helen eloped, and she could see, instead of the young officer, a wild black kitten who had clung to independence until he nearly froze. It had taken all of Letty’s patience and cunning to coax that kitten into the warm stable at Faverton Hall and then into her lap. She shook her head at her own foolishness and smiled at her nephew. There was nothing kitten-like about the tall soldier.

He returned her smile. “Until the balloon ascension,” he said.

“Now,” she said, rising, and pressing her advantage, “I have offered you a fine bed and must not keep you from it. Let me show you to your room.”

**** 3 ****

J
ack eyed the bed. It was, as he had suspected it would be, finer than any he had slept in lately and as seductive as a woman in silks. No doubt it would prove to be as soft and sweet as it was wide. Its golden hangings would shut out all light and any drafts, and he could lie undisturbed until noon or later.

The room was equally fine. Jack let his gaze wander from the high white ceiling with its sculpted molding, down the walls covered in fine straw-colored paper across which there ran a simple pattern of gold sprigs. Here and there the gleam of burnished wood, brass, or marble arrested his gaze. He felt the thickness of the carpet underfoot. It was a gentleman’s room, a rich gentleman’s room. How easy it would be in these surroundings to forget that he had no claim to such a title.

Well, he had been a soldier long enough to know that sometimes there was plenty and good quarters and sometimes empty stomachs and a night in the rain. No use denying himself the good quarters when the night in the rain would come soon enough. Still, it would not do to give in to the seductions of comfort. His mother had turned her back on such comforts when the Favertons refused to accept Tom Amberly, and Jack would do the same. He would not press to be admitted to a family that did not want him, not for all the silver in London.

He had refused Lady Letitia’s offer of a servant to assist him, and now he crossed the room, dropped into a large chair by the fire, and began to tug at his right boot. Before he allowed himself the luxury of the bed, he wanted to consider the odd circumstances of his voice speaking to him in London.

It was his mother’s voice he heard whenever danger threatened, speaking to him just as she had that night on the Guadarramma road in the swaying coach. His mother had pushed him from the rocking carriage, jumped down lightly behind, and given him a nudge toward a steep slope covered with shadowy woods beside the road. From the other side of the coach came the din of the ambush, horses stamping and neighing in fear, shouts, and shots. His heart had been pounding in his chest, and he had been unable to speak. She had pressed her wedding ring in his hand and closed his fingers over it. The ring hung even now on a chain around his neck, and he could feel it warm and familiar against his chest.
“Run, Jack. Live, Jack,”
his mother had urged, her eyes compelling him. He had run then, slipping and sliding down the embankment, and never looked back until he was far from the sounds of the frightened horses and the shots. Ever since, he had heard her voice, rousing his senses and his mind at the first hint of danger. He no longer ran, however. Small for his years at twelve, he had learned to fight since, as she had done that night behind him on the road, his father already dead.

The second of his boots yielded to his tugging and he looked up. A long, low chest of drawers stood against the opposite wall, above it some sketches and three small portraits he could not make out in the candlelight. Recognition came with a shock, and he understood why the voice had spoken so urgently the moment he had seen Lady Letitia’s face. In this house he would remember what he had lost and could not regain. The boot in his hand became heavy, and he lowered it to the floor. His throat felt dry and tight, and he could not draw a breath, but he rose and crossed to the pictures. He gripped the edge of the dresser and leaned near. There they were—his father and mother and himself as if nothing had happened or ever could, he with his father’s dark hair and his mother’s light eyes.

He reached for the picture of himself, recalling the artist’s studio and his father’s clowning to amuse him through the sittings. The picture lifted easily from the hook that held it. He opened a drawer, and, finding it empty, he placed his younger self inside. He reached for his father’s portrait and then his mother’s. He remembered her wrapping the finished paintings to ship to Aunt Letty. He closed the drawer and turned his back on the dresser and leaned against it. Suddenly he felt weary, and the bed looked almost too far away. Three, four days he had promised, until the balloon ascension, then he would be on his way.

Jack stood at the morning-room window, staring at the curtain of rain billowing across the square in front of his aunt’s town house. He was not going to escape easily. He looked again at the newspaper in his hand and listened to the spattering of the rain against the glass. The cold and damp seemed to reach him even though he was but a few paces from a coal fire.

He could not shake the feeling that he was engaged in a battle of wills with his aunt. It was a foolish feeling when he considered the warmth of her nature, her generous impulses, and the way she had not pressed him to meet any of her friends. Still it seemed that they were adversaries, moving cautiously around each other, careful to avoid giving the other the least advantage, and this rain was definitely to Lady Letitia’s advantage. His inner voice had spoken this morning, and moments later Hengrave and Gilling had arrived.

They had come to tell him they were leaving town. Without references, Gilling had not found the post he desired as a gentleman’s gentleman, and Hengrave’s uncle, who had promised the sergeant a position, was one of the bankruptcies in the
Morning Chronicle
.

Lady Letitia had insisted on offering the two men breakfast, and to amuse her, they had told stories of Jack’s adventures. But she had not been fooled about their circumstances, and Jack had sensed her desire to do something for the two soldiers. He was pleased that she had said nothing to embarrass his friends, for he had seen that spark in her eyes that meant she was contemplating a rescue.

In the week he had been with her he had discovered how many in Lady Letitia’s household had cause to be grateful to their employer for raising them from wretched circumstances, and he had seen how easy it was to arouse her compassion. When they’d visited the elephant at the Exeter ‘Change, Lady Letitia had been appalled at the plight of the prodigious beast in captivity so far from its native land. She had immediately demanded that the beast’s keepers do something to provide the animal with a more natural habitat, a demand that had unsettled the other spectators and incensed the guard. She had been asked to leave the premises, and only by proposing, quite seriously, a plot whereby the two of them would free the animal was Jack able to restore her spirits. He had made her laugh by painting a picture of the elephant in her garden as she directed Briggs in the shoveling of endless piles of leaves and hay. At last she had confided, laughing, that she would stick to rescuing kittens. But he knew she wouldn’t.

As if in answer to his thought, she pushed open the door to the morning room. He turned from the window.

“We could help them, you know,” she suggested without preamble, her guileless blue eyes as earnest as a child’s. “That is, you could.”

“It would be a bit like rescuing the elephant, wouldn’t it?” he replied. He held out the paper with its columns of bankruptcy announcements.

She looked down, but shook her coppery curls. “No,” she said, raising her chin. “We don’t have to save all of London from economic ruin, just two men.”

“How?” He could not help but ask. It was a bitter irony that he, who had never known nor cared for England, should be comfortable in London, while patriotic men went hungry for lack of work.

“Get each of them a position,” she said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

“Isn’t that what they’ve been trying to do?” he asked.

“Yes.” She waved their efforts aside. “But Gilling mustn’t take a position with some . . . Cit, all puffed up with consequence. You saw what a fine gentlemanly look he had. He must work for someone who will appreciate his abilities and someone who will be a credit to them, too.”

“Do you know a gentleman who’s looking for a valet?” Even as the words left his mouth, Jack heard the voice in his head.

“
You
,” she said.

“Oh, no, my lady, I am leaving London as soon as this rain lets up and we’ve had our balloon ascension.” It was no more than he expected, a scheme to keep him in London and involve him in the world of the
ton
. He had known that was her object from their first meeting, but he had been sure of his resistance to her efforts.